10 responses to “The Game Developer Research Institute is pretty great”

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  CRV September 10th, 2009 at 08:31

  Thank you for your support. I got way more traffic from your hidden messages post than I ever did posting interview excerpts on GameSetWatch. Not even close.

  As far as Japanese-English translations on the site go, I’m sure that’s not the only part that’s “a little off.” Getting in touch with Japanese developers without any knowledge of Japanese has been surprisingly easy. Getting stuff translated has been harder since it’s time-consuming. I certainly can’t afford to pay anybody to do it.

  Let’s see if this post motivates me to polish up the interviews. Probably won’t…

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  Celine September 10th, 2009 at 09:29

  Well all the argument about the story behind games never released or about unknown developers of old games receive little to no attention from gamers.
  Only a niche of a niche is interested in it.

  Personally I find interesting knowing about the people behind a game because that game is the result of those lives ( those experiences ) and all the talks about unreleased games has the same attraction of a “What/If” scenario.

  It’s really incredible the hard work and dedication of the persons behind sites like GDRI or unseen64.

  BTW I know at least 2 Razorsoft games that shouldn’t be released.
  One is The Brass Boss for Super Famicom the other is Keeper of the Gates for Genesis.

  Never heard about Akira for GG , I only know about the Snes/Sega CD version ( well aside from the amiga one that actualy got released ).

  Speaking of Kevin Spaghetti, in GameFan march ’95 there is some images of Dinoblaze for 3DO.

  The interview with Shouichi Yoshikawa is awesome but I don’t understand what he mean for “A sample ROM had come from Hudson that I played, but…No, I think the correct answer is that it never existed.”
  Was it for real or no ?

  Never know about Ultra Genjin however I read on an old magazine that Hudson had planned a sequel of Hagane for N64 ( TGS ’97 ).

  Good luck CRV 😉

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  keving September 10th, 2009 at 09:47

  Right, I mean that “the correct answer is that it never existed” should actually be “it never being released was the the correct [i.e. right] thing to do.”

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  jp September 10th, 2009 at 09:50

  Yeah, I just learned about this a couple of weeks ago and have been too busy to write about it yet, but it’s really quite an amazing piece of work, and I’ve been gushing to all my friends about it. Site organization is kind of awful, though.

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  Frank September 10th, 2009 at 16:03

  I agree with the title of this post, it’s everything I wanted Lost Levels to be but couldn’t motivate myself to do.

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  CRV September 11th, 2009 at 07:35

  > One is The Brass Boss for Super Famicom…

  Somebody somewhere got RazorSoft mixed up with Laser Soft. That’s Laser Soft’s Taiketsu!! Brass Numbers, which was released in the US by Renovation as Doomsday Warrior.

  > Site organization is kind of awful, though.

  Do you have any advice?

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  keving September 11th, 2009 at 09:07

  I do think it has the same problem I ran into with the old Magweasel — it’s packed with information, but there is not a lot of narrative. It’s like a great big college library, and if you’re not the sort of person who’s ready to devote the time exploring its shelves, it’s hard to find the really fascinating stuff.

  I think that perhaps writing some more narrative-oriented histories of development firms and pushing those on the front page (instead of presenting the majority of the site as an alphabetized list of companies) would help make things friendlier and easier to navigate. This is history that 99% of even hardcore game fans aren’t aware of, so going the more anecdotal route and discussing more about where a company was, what they did, and how you figured out that they wrote Game X or Game Y — that sort of thing would be great, I bet.

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  Celine September 12th, 2009 at 07:58

  @CRV
  Ah yeah you are right.
  The EGM article talked about Razorsoft of Japan ( probably a mispelling ).

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  Celine September 12th, 2009 at 08:21

  BTW does anybody know what game is at the mid-right of this scan ?
  http://www.gamengai.com/bonus/chirashi/superfamicom/enix922.jpg

  Seems a Famicom game to me but the last Enix famicom game should be Just Bread ( to the mid-left in that scan ).

  Can you , Kevin, do a quick translation ?

  Thanks 🙂

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  CRV September 12th, 2009 at 08:29

  @Celine

  I don’t think you want to link directly to images on Gamengai.

  I’d just like to add that GDRI doesn’t necessarily have to be about old games. It’s just that I’m not as interested in the newer stuff. Anybody is free to edit and create entries, as long as you’re fairly accurate and do a good job and don’t just blindly copy info from Moby Games or something.

  I’m also not so interested in doing game lists for companies like Capcom and Konami that publish what they develop, but there’s certainly lots of research to be done on various divisions and subsidiaries.

  Since it’s on my mind and I don’t feel like waiting for a post about this particular game to bring it up, I noticed Loretta Hieh on Facebook. A Loretta Hieh worked on the PCE version of Ninja Gaiden. I’d like to know if she’s the same person. There can’t be that many Loretta Hiehs out there, can there? Since I’m not on Facebook, is there anybody who is who’d like to make a go of trying to contact her?